An extremely rare early version of Minecraft, long thought to be lost, has been rediscovered over ten years after its release. Minecraft alpha 1.1.1 was released for the original Java Edition in September 2010 and was only available for around three hours, and now it’s finally been found again by gaming archivists.
There have been hundreds of versions of Minecraft over the years, and fans have carefully collected and archived most of them for reasons of preservation. However, one particular version, Alpha 1.1.1 or Seecret Saturday, was thought completely lost. While it introduced sneaking and fishing rods to Minecraft, it was discovered to have a game-breaking bug that would turn the screen completely gray, so was replaced within a few hours by version 1.1.2.
The whole tale of its rediscovery was told over Twitter by user @lunasorcery (via Kotaku), who found the lost alpha. As Luna explains, Alpha 1.1.1 had become a meme or even a holy grail in the Minecraft archiving Discord Omniarchive, and none of them expected to find it.
Someone discovered one of Luna’s old tweets and asked her about it, and she eventually discovered an old backup of minecraft.jar dated the same as Alpha 1.1.1’s release – September 18, 2010. Luna checked the file and confirmed that it was indeed Alpha 1.1.1, which she then posted about on Omniarchive – which blew up.
So I posted in the Omniarchive server, and it would be an understatement to say that a few people noticed.
Just from the reactions, the reality of how big a find this is starts to set in. I literally start shaking. pic.twitter.com/cAg8vgu2ox
— Luna 🏳️🌈 (@lunasorcery) June 26, 2021
Perhaps even more impressively, after Luna passed it on to the Omniarchive moderators, they determined that she’d downloaded it 89 seconds before it was wiped and replaced with 1.1.2. After discovering the Holy Grail of Minecraft archiving, Luna then went and found the Cross of Coronado too – a .jar of c0.29_01, which came out in 2009 and only previously existed in modified form.
Moral of the story: Never Delete Anything.
(also support archivists, they're doing important work)
— Luna 🏳️🌈 (@lunasorcery) June 26, 2021
Next on the list for miracles: Minecraft 2.